Don't know how women withstand the mental stimulation of so many winks, pokes and inane messages online: facebook, okcupid, twitter. Locked to a keyboard, no fear of carpal tunnel, we're jailed. Bank of America now has bullet proof glass surrounding their tellers. Whole Foods has computer monitors giving numbers of the next available cashier in a snaking airport security line, doors safely surrounded by glass partitions. The underlying theme of these designs is maximizing safety, controlling interaction with the public. It's unclear whether we feel the cynicism behind these societal changes.

But it begs the question: are we already trapped in the system? and how guilty am I for my own winks, pokes and inane messages online?

bye bye

Fuck it. Yeah, I don't need to be doing this anymore. I'm too exposed when typing my life into a desperate news real over the internet. Invitations occur regardless of the pool of life that is scrambling and swirling our minds and feelings. The past floats in and out of my life, a constant reminder of triumphs and failures. My good friend Nathan did it first. And now I have in a sense freed myself. It's melting my mind. Just put the computer back to its correct place as a tool. I'm about to lose my mind. I'm wondering if this technology has something to do with it. I haven't felt normal for the last two years and I've been on facebook for about two. It's time. Countdown to reality. Dive back in...

Decompression

He dropped down from the rock-and-roll floater, tail two feet below the nose of his board, hands at 12 and 6 o'clock, feet cross body, front knee to back elbow for the recoil from the drop. Andy Irons taildrop body english was etched in my mind. I could hear Perry Ferrell covering the Stones in that last great ...lost video, Lost at Sea, "Please allow me to introduce myself..." Just a bunch of friends who ripped and lived life to its fullest.

That's what I imagined before the sun set, October 10th, 10-10-10, paint brush in my hand, negative space shadows of figures in the barrel, airs, mist blowing out the back of the waves, painting before a crowd of strange, energized people, on one of two pieces of plywood my friend and I worked on from noon to midnight, under the freeway in San Francisco. I drew Andy right over a barrel like it was that same wave at Lance's.

The Mermen jammed out electronic fuzz and high octane 64th note delays, surf guitars on acid, and I was dressed like Hunter S. Thompson painting on chocolate covered mushrooms...it felt like my scene. Billy Shatner had run off into the crowd after his muse, down by the sculptures, closer to the techno. I'd paint for an hour, feigning some kind of structuralism, overly intellectual, cryptic lazy scrawls, some homage to Jean-Michel Basquiat, "Don't ever be sad", "I have a strange anthropomorphic bent", then Shatner would come back, the wild-eyed, dialated Aquarian, absorbing drama from his girl's intense feminism and paint fluorescent green over my shadow figures and waves I worked so hard on, Pollock splashes with the paint water, hand washes over psychedelic pastoral moment I imagined, gone forever. "He's so subtle," I heard earlier. The hippy girl in the half-vest snuck up behind me at one point and shot video, so subtly I didn't have time to think about her--curly brown locks, caramel skin--a moment of synchronicity, then she was gone.

I'm painting surf scenes stage left while the Mermen plug everyone into the air. Vanity strikes: First wave stood on, 1987, Lindamar Beach; surf, punk rock third wave, Mission gentrification opens the door to masses with tech money, bio, computer, hipsters in waves, 2000, the Albion becomes Delirium, 2007, Member's Only jackets, nylons and bicycles, Valencia looking like Sunset Blvd...live music, Frieda Kahlo parades on Dia De Los Muertos, playing a cello as a bass 23rd and Folsom, banging a floor tom with Ghost, 24th and Bryant, and the sun is setting, the Giants are about to win the penant, I had my first Giants hat when I was six. I was there--inside my head I'm screaming at Billy "SHE SAID SHE WOULD PAY $500!!!!! STOP PAINTING ON IT!!! WHY DID YOU PAINT OVER MY WAVES!!!!!"

I would wander off through the crowd for an hour while he painted, then we'd switch. Toward the end of the night he was quickly leaving for another world, his eyes the only thing to read. Hurt, worry...the muse is still open, his dad is still sick in the hospital...The sea is swirling, fluorescent, pagan, electric, tribal, weird shit is happening everywhere. They wanna look for more drugs. They're gonna wander down the block. The boys are young, talented, we're all friends. We're just looking to have a good time, she says. The look says, don't take her away. Don't take him either, not now.

I remember this, I swear. We're all in this together. Let's have another drink. Smoke a J. Furry hats and jackets, topless girls with face paint. None of that matters. That lady wasn't gonna buy the painting anyway. The money doesn't matter. We'll probably never see her again. It's not about the money. She was drunk off her ass...Let's get this shit done. Let's get you home. Yeah, I can drive. She's already there...

It all washed away. The moment was eternal, maximum. The sun set like a wave crashing. Two weeks later a parachute drew fire by the sea, in the rain, under a full moon. The Giants won the World Series on Dia De Los Muertos in Texas. Andy Irons died that same night in Dallas. Everything was different after that. I don't know how, but it was. The gates had opened. Now, sometimes I just don't wanna go to sleep...

So...

The coincidences led me forward. Yes, in a hippy-mystical way like James Redfield's book, "The Celestine Prophecy"...synchronicity leads you forward in a moment of indecision when you don't know what direction you're life should go. The higher power in whatever form shows you signs that you just need to be ready for, awake, alert, conscious: you've been thinking about going to Mexico and suddenly a commercial comes on TV to visit the Yucatan or you overhear a conversation where someone just got back from Cabo. You wonder whether you should study biology and your friend asks you if you want to go to the zoo.

But let me get rid of any vanity of being destined for something, even if it could be true. I've been drifting because I'm lazy, not because of a dizzying encounter with a chasm in my life. Yes, I do believe in the void, but it's ruined many a moment where I should've just put my arms around a girl instead of dragging her to the edge as if she didn't know that the dark existed.

In the last six months, where my sanity has been in question, I had moments roaming around San Francisco, drunk, stoned, with a guitar occasionally, trying to figure out where to go. I worked at Whole Foods for five years up until last June. The work paid just enough to keep me from complaining, but not enough to really ever get ahead. My coworkers and I shared a sort of entitled bohemian existence where nights out drinking helped ignore the question of whether we or not we deserved better then working in a grocery store. It's easy to say "yes, of course. Fuck that, I know..." But this question is deeply political and sociological. What is this better life we deserve? The tech nerds are rich and they can afford to shop at a place like Whole Foods. Their occasional displays of class conscious arrogance are the bain of many a charming artist jockying a cash register when they want to ring up a case of twelve bottles of champaigne in the 8 items or less express lane. They can afford to go out whenever they want and numb their brains with alcohol and drugs much more frequently and with better taste then the struggling Joe.

I don't know. I cannot wrap my head around this comparison. But I can say that their materialism is not going to change the world. That's all. Some of my good friends genuinely want to change the world, even if it's just their own.

In any event, there was synchronicity, strange conversations about the collective unconscious, characters that seemed out of the movies, so strange, sharp and genuine that I believed what they said. Some checked out online. Others I'll have to wait and see if they show up again.

forgot something

spit it out mr. schizophrenic. That the west was divied up, it's dangerous. On the fringe I tell myself it's not from the outset. Despite odd coincidences that the competition among muses fell to a certain few. Different levels of existence. Coke was the opposite of weed. Hyperdrive. I'm bored, I have to go do something. Versus nothing is ever a mistake, but it's still a lesson, an idea, that you have to develop.

This is frantic

But if you hey I had a great time last night. I don't meet girls like you that often. There's a thesus statement and something to expand on. Fuck it though.

This is boring

--------------------------------------------

before you left I freaked out. I wanted to drive out over the bridge to say "by." There was no reason not to, but you explore the ones that are sudden impulses like lighting bolts...I'm a prisoner, there's no use because it be better ifs and why ruin a good thing right? I know we'll come together again. ...and it's on a weird delay. The world with her was different. We're both able to find magic in the world but our language out of pragmatism and idealized delusions of grandeur shakes to the left where I'm pondering the ocean from the sand.

Drink beer in public as many times as possible. Have rational fears of catching something. Stay on the edge between roof leaping and holding someone for a lil bit. I shook when it was quiet. Tried to find the right music. silence the void.

People are stirring, shouting numbers in desperation
So I read the little note by chance

article beginning

Surfers live in a boundary between elemental forces, land and water, where two dimensions meet in alternating cycles of chaos and calm. When we leave the water and feel the sand and rocks getting dryer walking back to our terrestrial lives, onlookers not so vested sense something different about us. But the moment we come ashore the surfboard we carry becomes a symbol at best and a burden at worst. Like everyone else we have to get in a car, drive home and sleep in a room surrounded by four walls. Perhaps the hardest part of surfing is solving an infinitely complex equation of aesthetics and physicality--our relationship with the ocean--unfathomable beyond our endorphin-riddled enjoyment, living in a society that limits and overwhelms us at the same time, a society that requires an existential leap to achieve anything that compares to our lifelong passion.

Unlike our counterparts in Southern California, where beach culture is cushioned and isolated by vast track housing, warm weather and an industry built around it, surfers in the Bay Area deal with cold water and a social morphology that changes rapidly from the smell of salt and eucalyptus to the stench of human detritus, exhaust and urine, where artists and businessmen try to create meaning under the shadows of skyscrapers, the black dust of the freeways and the echo of police sirens. Some bay area surfers hide close to their favorite haunts in the foggy outer avenues of the Sunset or the coastside hills of the Peninsula and Marin County. Surfers are intrinsically fringe dwellers. But others try to find out what society has to offer.


Moving mountains must change your perspective on life. My brother recently told me he may be retiring his 9'6 Mavs gun. He cited the crowds, said that it's turned into a circus. This potential hand-me-down makes me nervous. There's no surfboard design that tests your skill more than this that doesn't require a motor, stirring the bile in your stomach. Surviving an elemental force makes normal life seem absurd. And when waves are over twenty feet, the absurdity increases exponentially.

Jim Kibblewhite lived this in the late eighties as Jeff Clark spread word of the dragon in his backyard, Mavericks, at a slow pace. Clark's Ocean Beach invitation to Santa Cruz kingpins Vince Collier and Richard Schmidt wouldn't happen until 1990. Ben Marcus's Surfer Magazine article on Pillar Point was released in 1991 and Maverick's place in surf lore took care of itself from there onwards. The days of empty, glassy Maverick's with just Clark, Kibblewhite, Matt Ambrose and the rest of the crew from Pacifica and the coastside was relegated to "Golden Days" status. After having it good like this, where do you go from there?

June 2000

I wouldn't meet Jim in person till we crossed paths in Kuta Beach. Two years before its demise, Paddy's Irish Bar was DJ central on Legian. Jim was in his element on the dancefloor, dressed low-key and stylish in a sunburned sea of boardshorts and Bo Derek braids, hanging with a pretty Italian girl. I'd only seen him in the water at Rockaway Beach when the swell was over twelve feet, so it was telling that we'd meet in a mystical place like Bali. A ragtag group of misfits from the bay area was in Kuta at the same time: Curt Myers from Half Moon Bay, Shawn Rhodes, Joe Grochowski, Andy Anderson and others from Pacifica had just returned from a two week boattrip in the Mentawais. Andy Olive and some of the "groms" from the City, as everyone was calling them at the time, were spotted at McDonalds, the cave at Ulu's and Sari Club. For a wind-down a group of the Pacifica crew ended up on a week-long tour of Lombok and western Sumbawa. Though the swell didn't cooperate outside of a tiny low-tide pulse at Scar Reef on day two and our last day at Desert Point, Rhodes put on a backside tube-riding clinic. with fishing, spliffs donated from a trio of Spaniards from the Canary Islands, and one night of debauchery in the Gilis took up the rest of our time.

Three years earlier, Jim went into the desert in northwest Nevada. Burning Man was in its seventh year on the ancient dry lakebed, the Playa, as it's called. Although the underground scene that pollinated the world with house music from Detroit, would fade with the advent of coliseum-filled commercial raves, the feeling dispersed to different places. The water brings the silt to the desert floor in a perpetual cycle.

October 24, 2010

Ten years later I got an invitation on facebook from Jim for a full-moon party. He'd been neighbors with the Keating clan, Pacifica royalty, for a good part of the decade on the rustic boatdocks at the south end of Lindamar Beach. Rain had been in the forecast all week, but the plans for the party went on undaunted. I lived less than a mile from the docks across from the Quikstop on Roberts and Crespi. The first rain of the season was unrelenting. As the San Francisco Giants had just won the National League Penant, I was content listening to some records and calling it a night. But around three in the morning, as the rain was blowing sideways, with a mellow high, I went to the balcony and heard bass thumping through the rain. I threw on my shoes and a snowboard jacket. I had to go.

The tent that covered Kibblewhite's house was visible from the highway. It was a parachute moored to the docks. Walking in the rain I saw a young couple making their way back to the valley. There weren't a lot of cars on the highway and the south wind pushed the rain in my face. I stepped in some puddles behind the surf shop and made my way up the levy getting closer to the house music.

A carved chest sat at the top of the stairway down from the levy. Along the wooden fence were a string of lights. There were lanterns posted atop wood pilons and the red parachute was lit from the inside. Though the party had peaked earlier, there were committed revelers chatting and dancing inside the house and on the docks. When the tent flapped open, it revealed the moonlit swell combing Lindamar while a beautiful raven-haired Russian girl finessed the ebb and flow of the pulsing electronica. The tent contracted and expanded in the wind, opening and closing while the fire pit exhaled glowing ashes.

I'd missed the peak of the party, but the tribe was still going strong in a late fall celebration.

rites of passage

either way, it arrived. The age of aquarius was marked by something as random and unforeseen as the San Francisco Giants winning the world series. The smallest big city in the world would be overrun by a feeling of 700,000 people all making the existential leap into possibility where none exists. Relationships were rocky towards the end of the era of Pisces, the fish. But this was everything in the new package. Everything was brought to the surface in Aquarius through arguments, body language and a return to another accepting era of consumption and an accelerated fashion show getting its ridiculous speed in direct proportion to how many eighties movie stills were available on the internet and how many delay altered songs used samples from the eighties to dance to redundant 4/4 rhythm using a kick on every eighth note or a Roland 404 sampler.

That's how I know that's the Clash. I was there...in the nineties. Motherfuckers. Ha ha.

I'm glad that "ha ha" replaced "lol". Sometimes I don't even laugh.

My only knowledge of the age of Aquarius comes from three Aquarius friends.

1) Jane: Broke my heart, but remained a distant siren in my life because our friendship was true and she had ridiculously hot lips. I made fun of her chicken legs but in truth they were worthy of an adjective in a Prince song. I wrote a story and named her Rhiannon. She could read me like a book. She reads the world like a book.

2) Perry: painted over paintings I had done of waves while we collaborated on two eight by five foot pieces of plywood at the Decompression while on mushrooms while the Mermen channeled electricity through their surfed out guitars in a confluence of (a) painting in front of thousands of people (b) surfing since childhood and (c) seeing my life written before me as the world sped up and I slowed down, all in weird coincidences that centered around my going to Black Rock City. It was collaborative so the hallucination must have tripped Perry into what seemed like a fit worthy of Jackson Pollock. Water was thrown with paint and rubbed on the canvas. Everything was graffiti. My waves were gone. We laughed afterwards. The world is absurd. Why does it matter?

3) Mariah: After I got of the bus I bombed down Castro. The cute girl with the knee-high socks, a sideways hat over her long blonde hair and cutoffs went straight down the hill to 18th. "You beat me!" I said to her at the 33 bus stop.

"This fuckin sucks," she said. "The bus isn't coming for like an hour."

"Where do you live?"

"Twin Peaks."

"C'mon, I'll give you a ride." I said, walking up the hill.

She's drunk and nineteen.

We talk about life for a good twenty minutes between the walk and the drive.

A few weeks earlier she fell skating and blacked out from a concussion.

She has pictures of her black eye on her iPhone

I saw her on a train. She gave me a hug goodbye on Clayton and 17th. Then she yelled, "Did I leave my sweater in your car?"

The guy behind me honks and yells at me, something I couldn't hear. I hand her her sweater and as I flip an illegal u-turn in a five-way intersection I catch a glimpse of her, skateboard in hand (not a longboard, a legitimate hardcore skateboard with 55 cm wheels and a blunted twin-tip), with her sideways hat and knee socks.

Where the hell am I right now?

Too bad she has a girlfriend.

Ha ha...